ARTS ONLINE; Drawing (and Doodling) With Countryside as Canvas

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In his 1939 novel ''Goodbye to Berlin,'' Christopher Isherwood famously decreed, ''I am a camera.'' By the same logic, the British artist Jeremy Wood must be a pen. ''That's right,'' Hugh Pryor, Mr. Wood's collaborator, said, ''and I'm the piece of paper.''

But the two artists are not, as Isherwood would have it, merely passive recorders of passing scenes. Instead, they ramble across the English countryside and crisscross small-town streets to create their art: enormous virtual drawings of a fish, a boat and other figures that become visible only when the path of each journey is reproduced later, at a smaller scale, on the Internet.

To document their miles-long renderings, these artists use the Global Positioning System. This network of 24 satellites emits signals that allow anyone's location on earth to be identified within a few yards. The same technology is installed in cars to help drivers to avoid getting lost.

As if they were skywriting on the ground, the artists trace a route for, say, a gigantic elephant over the streets of Brighton. Mr. Pryor described their role as tool as well as artist. ''Using your position, you're the tip of the pen,'' he said. They carry a hand-held receiver that calculates where they are and limns their movements on its tiny screen. Mr. Pryor has written a program that converts the raw logistical data, which can span miles, into a smaller digital image that can be shown on a screen-size canvas -- a Web site at www.gpsdrawing.com.

In small but growing numbers, digital artists are making the Global Positioning System their brush or pencil. Like traditional artists, each employs this technology for vastly individual creations. For instance, some Italian artists are using the system to track their daily movements, which are posted on maps on their Web site as part of a project on the perils that electronic data gathering poses to personal privacy.

Why the sudden interest in a space-age technology that has been kicking around for two decades? For one thing, the government lifted restrictions in 2000 that had prevented the public from running the system with the same accuracy as the military. Meanwhile, the receivers have become smaller, lighter and, most important, cheaper, with some models selling for less than $200. The system is best known as a navigational aid for cars and boats, and it is occasionally used to lead hikers on treasure hunts, a practice known as ''geocaching.''

The Global Positioning System is not strictly considered part of the Internet, but it is a close cousin. Both are invisible networks of digital information. The Internet is everywhere and nowhere at any moment. On the other hand, the Global Positioning System tells you where you are in the datasphere.

Laura Kurgan, a New York artist and architect who made an artwork based on the positioning system in 1995, said it appealed to artists because it crossed the boundaries between the real and virtual. When she carries a receiver, she said, the system converts her physical location into a digital map. ''It's a very poetic instrument,'' she said. ''You walk around, and it's not drawing you, it's drawing a map. So it's an instant translation from one medium into another.''

The virtual drawings of Mr. Wood and Mr. Pryor also have antecedents in art history. Like the ancient Nazca line drawings in Peru, the carvings on Stone Mountain in Georgia or Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty,'' the British artists treat the landscape as their canvas. In recognition of this, last fall they hiked an 8.5-mile path to trace digitally the shape of the large white horse that was etched into a chalky hillside 3,000 years ago near their homes in Oxfordshire.

Mr. Wood is driven by the same imperative as any traditional artist of the past. ''My work has always been about drawing,'' he said, ''and this was a logical progression. I just saw this as an opportunity with this medium to make drawings that could be of an incredible scale. Initially it was great fun and semi-serious. But the more one thought about it, the more there was to it.''

Their first drawing was executed in November 2000. The pair, who had met in art school, were studying photocopies of local maps, looking for familiar shapes they could color with felt-tip markers, a Rorschach sort of exercise with roadways instead of inkblots.

Discerning a fish around the village of Wallingford, they followed the route and used Mr. Wood's hand-held receiver to map the car journey. Three hours and 67 rain-soaked miles later, their fish was complete. Pubs tend to be featured in stories about British artists, so naturally the pair opted to proceed with the project over jars of bitter at the King's Arms in Oxford. They also decided to exhibit their work online. ''You can't go around showing everyone your picture of a fish on a G.P.S. screen,'' Mr. Pryor said.

Since then, they have made about two dozen drawings, including a butterfly around Nottingham and the face of a professor around Oxford. Most routes are marked out in advance, but they also experiment with free-form drawings, which are sometimes made by attaching a receiver to a friendly pet and letting it go. To make the most abstract drawing, Mr. Wood said, ''the tricky thing is to get the least obedient dog.''

Others, like a San Diego glider pilot, have started to contribute drawings to the site. Mr. Wood said recognizable shapes would be harder to create in the United States, where many towns are laid out in a grid. This may explain why no one has yet sketched a portrait of David Letterman or Derek Jeter over Manhattan.

The two Italian artists behind the 0100101110101101.org Web site are employing the Global Positioning System to quite different effect. Since late January, the anonymous duo has been using the system to track their location. Every time they make a mobile-phone call, the data is sent to their computer and their location is updated on a map on the site. One can see where they live in Barcelona, and that they visited Germany last week.

The new project is an extension of their ongoing ''Life Sharing'' project, which makes the total contents of their computer, from software to e-mail messages, available to all who visit their site. As this online performance expands to include their exact location, we learn even more about them, and about how much of people's personal lives is at risk of exposure as banal tidbits of electronic information are accrued by others. ''We are lab rats for the information-technology era,'' the duo's male artist said.

Other art projects involving the Global Positioning System are under way. A team in Germany is creating a computer-based audio book that uses the system to control what its ''readers'' hear in headphones as they stroll Berlin's streets. Depending on where they stand, they may listen to different characters' voices. In Singapore, the Tsunamii.net group has been using the system to act as a remote Internet browser, with Web pages in a museum gallery changing as a real-world traveler crosses certain points.

And later this year, Mr. Wood and Mr. Pryor may exhibit some of their dog-made drawings in a gallery exhibition called, aptly enough, ''Bathos.'' Acknowledging that some might question the use of such high-flying technology for such a barking-mad purpose, Mr. Pryor said, ''It's a bit like using a laser in a top fusion laboratory to cook a baked bean.''

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A version of this article appears in print on , Section E, Page 2 of the National edition with the headline: ARTS ONLINE; Drawing (and Doodling) With Countryside as Canvas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe